Day: October 14, 2015

Feeling proud

Today is LE GORGEOUS fall day, swirling leaves and soft breezes.  We went to Oakalla, and on a whim when we got there I bore left and we walked the long way ’round, ending up at Hart House.  Sensing that the downscale price was upscale in size, I went for the shaved prime rib on ciabatta sammie with crunchy onions and Nippon style aioli and Paul went for the seared fish, which I knew was gonna be tiny, but the presentation was so amazing I’ll leave it to your imagination rather shove it in your face.  The heritage parti-coloured radish slices danced a magnificent solo in a spotlight in the early afternoon sun (Paul picked the best lit table in the whole place, surprise surprise.) Then I ate them. And now they are turning into something dark and unpleasant, and such is the fate of every restaurant meal that every food critic ever had time to digest.

Shit Allegra why would you do that?  Hey, I could have posted a picture, but I don’t even take pictures of my grandson most of the time. He is a verb, and pictures seem a very pale representation of his business and verve. I understand why people pic their meals but gadfrey sir a little restraint.

And of course for privacy reasons fewer pictures.

After the meal we made a post-prandial tour of the southern side of the lake, linking back up with the trail at the first diversion from the western parking lot. I have since measured it and it totalled 5.5 K and I was thrilled because that’s what I eyeballed it (I had said what is this, 5, 5.5 k) so I’m glad I can accurately estimate a distance, being reality based is good.

I did not finish my sammie.  I looked at the second half and thought “There are few things on this earth that could make Jeff happier to eat right now”” and I took it home to him, and he ate it with every sign of delight.  I left him to watch Z Nation and came upstairs to tell you that my feet HURT.  Feel good though!

 

countermeasures

What a fucking disaster of a review.

Eventually the movie review will be gone, so here’s a quote.

 

What’s it like for him to be alone for years? Is the sheer solitude a burden? Is the simple lack of human contact a cause of psychological derangement? Are there exercises that he does in order to ward off hallucinations, to control inner voices? And what are those voices? What does Mark say to himself? What does he think–or feel? Is there anything that he has to overcome in order to remain mentally sharp and emotionally stable?

oh my FUCKING GOD you asinine critter, don’t you think astronauts are SELECTED for their ability to stay sane in these circumstances?  It’s called WORKING THE PROBLEM.  They don’t show him masturbating, although disposing of the consequences would be a funny couple of minutes, and they don’t show him crying, or hitting things, or any of that stuff. Any sane person knows it happened; we don’t need to see it.

 

THE IMPORTANT THING ABOUT THIS MOVIE WAS NOT THE PERSONALITIES of the characters involved.

It was in their ability to work problems.

The author of this review, who’s a chump’s own chump, is under the impression that science fiction fans – a demographic that is rapidly approaching everyone who is not a religious fanatic, hermit or killjoy – want to see another movie with people talking about their feelings or their interior lives.  No, we want to see a SCIENCE fiction movie. Not a movie that waves its hands when it comes to science but one that says you have to understand orbital mechanics to link up with a flying object in the Mars gravity well. Where mass and math and persistence and grit make survival possible, make triumph possible, make the unification of the world in its concern for a single human being possible.

The ’emotional tenor’ of the movie is SIMPLE.

We’re going to take our feelings, and we are going to set them aside, and WORK A FUCKING PROBLEM until it is done.

And despite the whitewashing of the movie, and yes it’s true, ethnicities were changed and that’s notable, something was preserved that I think is more important.  A young black mathematician gets called a steely eyed missile man by the Hermes crew, which is, without a word of a lie, the highest praise you can give a technical man in a space crisis situation. A generation of black kids will be dreaming of Mars based on this one sentence in the movie.  May the great parent of the Universe give a line of reasoning to Richard Brody, since he could really use one.

The emotional tenor of the movie is simple.  Why do people rescue other people.  BECAUSE WE ARE SOCIAL.  Now leave me alone, I’m working a solution that’s going to help other people.  You can assume I have an interior life. Because we all do.